The MMO 'War Thunder' has just gone through a small evolution with today's 1.77 'Advancing Storm' update.

The developers says they worked on a brand new game engine refresh, "Dagor Engine 5.0" which brings with it: Realistic mud and puddles, New anti-aliasing technology (Variance Clipping TAA), Realistic rain effects, Layered fog and mist effects, Dynamic clouds and sun and loads more graphical improvements.

You will also find new ground and air vehicles including the Leopard 2K tank, American M1 Abrams, the British Challenger and more. There's also new aircraft like the British Martin-Baker MB 5, the USSR La-200 and more.

In addition, the War Thunder has loads of new and reworked sounds for ground vehicles along with adjustments to the sounds themselves depending on different situations. It sounds like quite a lot of work went into this release, here's the trailer…

I actually quite like War Thunder, had an absolute blast with our Friday livestreamer Samsai when we played together and that was quite some time ago. Since then they've updated tons of system within the game.

Introduction

In the last few years CSS preprocessors had a lot of success. It was very common for greenfield projects to start with Less or Sass. And it’s still a very popular technology.

The main benefits of those technologies are, in my opinion:

They allow to nest selectors

The provide an easy imports functionality

They give you variables

Modern CSS has a new powerful feature called CSS Custom Properties, also commonly known as CSS Variables.

CSS is not a programming language like JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby or Go where variables are key to do something useful. CSS is very limited in what it can do, and it’s mainly a declarative syntax to tell browsers how they should display an HTML page.

But a variable is a variable: a name that refers to a value, and variables in CSS helps reduce repetition and inconsistencies in your CSS, by centralizing the values definition.

And it introduces a unique feature that CSS preprocessors won’t never have: you can access and change the value of a CSS Variable programmatically using JavaScript.

The basics of using variables

A CSS Variable is defined with a special syntax, prepending two dashes to a name (--variable-name), then a colon and a value. Like this:

Browser support

CSS Variables are here to stay, and you can use them today if you don’t need to support Internet Explorer and old versions of the other browsers.

If you need to support older browsers you can use libraries like PostCSS or Myth, but you’ll lose the ability to interact with variables via JavaScript or the Browser Developer Tools, as they are transpiled to good old variable-less CSS (and as such, you lose most of the power of CSS Variables).

'We're drowning in email. And the many hours we spend on it are generating ever more work for our friends and colleagues. We can reverse this spiral only by mutual agreement. Hence this email charter.'
— Direct link

For those who love emulation, you might want to know about Citra [Official Site], a work in progress Nintendo 3DS emulator that we've never written about here before. It seems they've been hard at work too!

Unlike the Dolphin emulator for the GameCube and the Wii, Citra is not currently moving towards Vulkan. Instead, they've poured a lot of work into their current OpenGL renderer to improve performance and fix rendering issues and from what they've shown, it's getting quite impressive.

They've said that the new update is giving approximately 2x speed performance boost tested across various hardware configurations. Now, Citra will do the entire GPU emulation on the host GPU instead of the CPU.

On top of that, they've also rewritten texture forwarding support (to avoid a costly synchronization of textures between emulated 3DS memory and the host GPU memory) which not only increases the performance of many games, it also fixes some issue when upscaling the rendering to improve the actual look of the game like this example:

Then they showed off a few charts to show the improvement, like this one which shows just how much performance has improved.

Those are some huge gains and it sounds like it was quite a lot of effort, especially with OpenGL drivers varying across Linux, Mac and Windows in terms of performance and OS-specific issues. They've also been dealing with cases where the OpenGL documentation isn't great with ambiguous wording. That's a complaint I've heard a few times, which is why there's been such a big focus on good documentation for Vulkan.

Life is Strange: Before the Storm [Steam], the standalone story adventure set three years before the original is officially heading to Linux! Feral Interactive have today announced that it will arrive sometime this Spring.

Feral Interactive ported the original Life is Strange episodes to Linux, so I’m not surprised they’re teaming up again to bring Before the Storm to Linux. I think they did a very good job of the port before and I certainly enjoyed it a lot. Life is Strange: Before the Storm - Deluxe Edition for Linux will include all three episodes along with the bonus episode, "Farewell".

This standalone prequel isn’t actually made by the originally developer Dontnod, instead the the publisher picked Deck Nine.

“With its tough yet vulnerable protagonist, Life is Strange: Before the Storm is a poignant evocation of teenage life,” said David Stephen, Managing Director of Feral Interactive. “The atmospheric soundtrack, sharp writing and captivating story combine to create an engrossing and moving game, and we very are excited for macOS and Linux players to experience it.”

Feral said that pricing and system requirements will be confirmed closer to release. You can see the official news post over on the Feral Interactive site. They also now have a mini-site set up for it with a few more details.

Slime Rancher [GOG, Steam], the game about running around sucking up cute (and some not so cute) slimes and running a farm is easily one of the sweetest games available on Linux and the Mochi's Megabucks update is rather good.

Firstly, you no longer need to tweak anything to get around the old Unity3D bug where on Linux you would get a blackscreen, as they've updated Unity for this release and it works perfectly now!

They also have a trailer for the new release:

Now onto the good stuff…this update expands the game quite a lot and from what I've seen it's a really great addition to the game! The map is bigger again, with the new Nimble Valley area to unlock and explore. There's new treasure pods to find and a new type of Slime: Quicksilver Slimes. These little devils are super fast and feed on electricity! Their plorts (the little gems the slimes poop-out) can't be sold the usual way on the Plort Market, instead they can only be deposited at Mochi’s Manor. Catching them can be tricky, so Mochi has a few tricks up their sleeve to help with this.

To unlock this new area, you will need to have complete a Range Exchange request with Mochi, unlock the Indigo Quarry, and purchase The Grotto ranch expansion. There's also plenty more bug fixes and optimizations done.

You can find it now on GOG and Steam. The GOG build is currently out of date, so I've reached out to the developer to ask them to update it.

If you still haven't picked up a copy—just do it! It's such a wonderful game. Another developer who has repeatedly put out big content updates for free, they're well worth supporting.

According to TorrentFreak, Serious Sam's Bogus Detour [Steam] is being pirated by Voksi, one of the people known for cracking Denuvo.

In this article, Torrent freak describes how the pirate Voksi is a fan of the Serious Sam Franchise and was actually a beta tester of Serious Sam, as well as being listed in the credits for that reason.

The game was released in June which included day-1 Linux support. Despite positive reviews and a "Very Positive" user rating on steam, 6 months later, the game didn't even cover development costs, let alone make a profit. It was a flop!

Voksi contacted the developers and they agreed to have him pirate the game for marketing purposes. They created a special build that's fully playable, even with network play. The special build is slightly less polished and always displays a message at the bottom of the screen saying,

We are small indie studio. If you liked the game, please consider buying it. Thank you and enjoy the game!

While the special build is for Windows, these developers are unconventional in their methods. They support Linux which unfortunately is also unconventional in the gaming industry. Serious Sam's Bogus detour has been mentioned here a fewtimes before on GOL. (Note: It is available on GOG as well, but not the Linux version)

This is quite a surprise, KING Art have revamped their 'whodunit' adventure game The Raven – Legacy of a Master Thief and it's now available.

Going by the aptly named The Raven Remastered, it's actually free for everyone who owned the original! I love it when developers do this, it's not like they have to, but it's still great. Here's the trailer:

Features:

A classic whodunit adventure from KING Art, the creators of the Book of Unwritten Tales-series

Experience a thrilling crime story through the eyes of multiple characters

Classic murder mystery locations, from a train in the Swiss alps, to a majestic cruise ship and the Cairo Museum

High quality voice acting from a compelling cast of quirky characters

Fully remastered animations, lighting and hair in full HD resolution

You can find it on GOG and Steam, although the Linux build on GOG is not yet up it is coming soon. They state it directly on the GOG page and I've also been informed directly it is coming, it just needs a little extra testing by GOG. Update: The GOG build is now up!

If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
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